


This might be the worst story of all time but ok

by psychicmewhealer



Category: No Fandom, Original Work
Genre: Attempted Murder, Don't Examine This Too Closely, Don't Read This, Dystopia, F/M, Fat Shaming, Gen, Government, Government Conspiracy, Gun Violence, High School, I'm Bad At Tagging, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, LSD, Murder, Overpopulation, Pasta, Plot Twists, References to Drugs, Robots, Running Away, School, Social Commentary, Social Issues, Some Plot, Suicide, Suicide Notes, This Is Not Going To Go The Way You Think, This Is STUPID, Underage Drug Use, school stress, xanax mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:33:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24410623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psychicmewhealer/pseuds/psychicmewhealer
Summary: Based on a writing prompt from a friend of mine.Sylvia Stratton needs to survive high school in her hypercompetitive, overpopulated dystopia. Will she succeed? What secrets will be uncovered?--Or: me trying to be fake deep with something barely resembling a plot
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Male Character





	1. Chapter 1

Sylvia Stratton walked through the hallway, sweating like a fountain. She just finished her math and history tests, but her English test was next, and her Chinese and science tests would be tomorrow.

The scores on the hallway television flashed in her lifeless brown eyes. She was only in second place for the math test. The English and history tests, though, she got first.

Her eyes locked onto the 2 next to her name.

Sylvia let her eyes glide down to the bottom of the screen for five minutes, all the way to the last place. Paris Levitt. She got a ghastly 88.98% on the test. Sylvia shuddered in disgust. An 88.98%? She almost felt bad for the girl despite her obvious incompetence and laziness, the way her parents must look at her, the way the school would look at her.

And of course, Paris would kill herself. That was the way it was and that was the way it had always been. The infomercials would talk about it. The declining performance in students throughout the years.

Sylvia’s hair frizz landed in front of her eye. She shooed it away. It was almost lunchtime. But it’s not like she would eat lunch anyway. Everyone knew lunch made you fat. And it was time spent better studying.

“So, how was your day, Sylvia?” her mother asked.

“It was good, I guess,” Sylvia muttered, between homework problems, in a rushed car ride home.

Sylvia’s mother said nothing more to her as she called a colleague from her phone for the next fifteen minutes.

And Sylvia just waited.

When the family arrived home, her mother turned on the TV. Another ad showed up, about the overpopulation of the planet. The biggest thing right now. It was always clear from the ads.  _ Overpopulation is a big deal; buy this weight loss pill so you can be worth it, _ goes one ad.  _ Overpopulation is ruining the planet; use this vacuum cleaner ― they’re eco-friendly and running out,  _ preaches another. 

Three in the morning. Finishing her sixteenth practice essay on the theory of noun classifiers, Sylvia knew she would fail. At highest, she’d get a 96.74% (she shuddered). At lowest, well...if she got that low, why live?

Sylvia held back a second sip of coffee. Too much sugar, and she’d be ugly. Not that she wasn’t hideous to begin with. Pinching her nonexistent stomach, she finished her essay, taking the last stroke on the paper with her chocolate-colored, flimsy, spider like hand. 

Twelve body paragraphs in fifteen minutes? The essay was twenty. She wanted ten minutes to check. 

She slipped out another piece of paper and wrote the first character. 

“Unfortunately, we lost another student last night,” the teleprompter announced. On the television was a face of about fifteen with bleach blonde hair and perfect proportions. 

“Oh my Xan, it’s so obvious she had Botox,” remarked Amanda. “Her cheeks have no life in them.”

Chad added, “And look at her five chins! What was she eating?” He appended later that her bikini shot was “disgusting.”

“Her GPA was lower than how high I was last night,” remarked Brent. “Like, how hard is a 6.83?”

No one dared remark that when she had a 7.32 and straight passes, they complimented her every feature. 

3,000 questions. 5 essay questions. 1 hour.

It all passed by in a blur. Sylvia stood in catatonia whenever she thought about the grades and rankings she’d get for the Chinese test. The numbers 9 6. 7 4 stood in her head, ready to prove just how worthless she was. 

The rankings showed up the next day. 

She waited to see her disgusting face on the television, and waited, and waited. 

The science test, she got lucky. Must have been easy grading. 102.19.

The Chinese test, not so much. She waited and waited and stood there to see her grade and got —

—

87.94%. 

Sylvia took a deep breath. Everything will be okay after this. She held her hands around herself, rubbing them together as a relaxing sensation. She removed her shoes, but put them back on. She shouldn’t be remembered as the student whose uniform was for mere convenience.

The school roof smelled of blood. Given its name as Suicide Mountain, there was no reason to ask why. 

She took one last look at her Insta for some sui-spo to keep her going.  _ When you leave, nothing will change but your cleared mind, _ it said, with a supermodel running in the background, blowing a perfect kiss to her audience. 

After posting a sui-spo selfie of her own with puckered lips saying  _ No one cares about you,  _ she counted down. 

Three…

Two…

One…

And the feeling of fresh air massaging her face. 


	2. Chapter 2

Fletcher stretched down to examine ‘68’s motherboard, moving his circular sunglasses to reveal his pale face and wide set eyes.

“You’re not allowed to do that, T-10368,” Dr. Fletcher laughed, screwing in its new motherboard. “You should be motivating suicide, not doing it to yourself.”

“You’re right, Fletcher. Kids these days are so superficial,” Dr. Blynn explained while loading its memory files. “All they care about are their looks, their grades, and their followers. And if they don’t meet those needs, they end their lives. So if you increase the competition, the needs aren’t met, and suicide rates skyrocket, thereby preventing overpopulation. It’s all according to plan.”

“I get that it’s according to plan, but it’s unfortunate that kids are such morons,” Fletcher complained. “Why couldn’t ‘68 just keep doing its crap over there instead of having me fix it again?”

“It caused 673 suicides in its six months at William James, a middle-class area,” Blynn sparkled. “How much more could it do to save the world in somewhere like...LA? It would change everything.” 

She paused. “When I get it approved by the feds.”

Blynn cleared her throat. “Anyway, let’s look at its memory.”

“But —”

_ 07-13-22 02:13:06.57 _

_ Chinese essay. Sixth attempt at 10 minute essay worthy of 130.76 to raise my GPA to a measly 7.23. If I don’t do it...goodbye, world. Sorry for letting you down. Not like I mattered anyway.  _

_ Move move move my fingers. Now, the theory of noun classification… _

And, delete. 

“Let’s move you along,” Blynn remarked as she carefully placed ‘68 on the assembly line. In it went to the tube, hundreds of recycled droids behind her. In she would go, her parts deconstructed and replaced with new ones. In she would go, her CPU loaded with a new name and a new life. In she would go, her face re-washed, with a new family taking her in and a new town’s memory manipulated. For she was disposable anyway. They all were. Everyone was.


	3. Chapter 3

Everyone was…

Everyone was…

Fletcher drove home in his state-given electric car. He would usually listen to Rick Astley semi-ironically at this point, but something felt unusually wrong to him. It was the same job he’d been doing for the past however-many years. Same day. Even the whole tidbit about the feds was fairly normal. But something felt wrong…

Maybe it was the first time it mattered… or the first time he looked at one of their memories…

Fletcher arrived home. It was an opulent home, especially for a high school dropout. How he got into government service from there, he did not know. No, really, he did not know. He did not remember. At all.

“Sid?” His wife called from upstairs. “Dinner’s ready. It’s ravioli night.”

“Nora?” He called back. She didn’t answer. 

He put his plate on the small, round oak table in the living room. He would be eating on the couch tonight. No matter Nora’s complaints, he told himself. 

He poured all the sauce in the large glass container onto the ravioli plate. It mostly spilled off of the plate and onto the table and couch. He stuffed the ravioli into his mouth indiscriminately, letting red sauce and cheese circle his mouth. The tingling feeling of the sauce around his mouth, his mind screaming to clean up and get this off, one piece landing its way into a flower pot across the room...

Not much of the pasta actually made it into his mouth by the end. Sidney felt his head contract. 

And the headache…like his brain was telling him to clean up. 

But he wouldn’t listen. He wouldn’t. He would prove to himself he was human. 

He didn’t shower or change for bed. He lay there, embracing the puffy, brown blanket. 

“Can we not watch TV tonight?” Sid asked.

“Why?” Nora momentarily touched his shoulder, jerking her hand off after feeling the sauce slathered on it.

“I want to talk to you about something.”   
Nora was bewildered. “Is it about the mess you’ve been making everywhere?”

He sighed. “Today I saw things I never should have seen.”

“What things?”

“Memories. Memories of a girl.” He paused. “I can’t tell you much else.”

If I’m a robot, I would follow the orders of my creator.

He corrected himself. “The government’s been creating robots. Infiltrating them in schools. Increasing competition and suicides.”

“Who’s your supplier?”

“Of what?”

“Of LSD, because you must be high. I don’t believe you. I distrust the government as much as anyone, but this seems kind of farfetched. I mean, how effective can it be, anyway?”

“Very much so. The suicide rate’s going way up. It might not lead to population decline now, but once there’s less teens making babies, there’ll be an overall decrease, apparently. The only issue is that the highest rates are in urban, middle class schools that are already competitive. But those people aren’t the ones having a bunch of kids.”

“So is that what you want to tell me? Your government secrets?”

“Kind of. What I was going to say was that my job isn’t the executive organization or programming, but the wiping. Of the robots. And I don’t usually look at their memory; their hard drive, what’s stored on it. It’s not against the rules, per se, but it’s discouraged. So I don’t.

“But my assistant turned it on…showed me one of the last memories…of this girl ― this robot ― and it struck me; it struck me how ignorant she was about the fact that she was not human.

“And if she didn’t know, could anyone know?”

“So you tried creating as much chaos as possible…” Nora interjected.

“To prove to myself that I was human, yes.”

“All that proves is that you’re willing to forego some logical principles for others. It can’t prove anything on its own. It’s perfectly possible you’re still a robot and your programming forced you to do this.”

“So I did this all for nothing?”   
“Maybe not, babe.”

Sid breathed out, inching closer to Nora.

“Nora?”   
“Yes?”

“Are...you human?”

“Yeah, why?”

Sid dashed out of bed. Nora groaned and fell asleep. 

A few minutes had passed when Sid entered the bedroom. He inched closer to Nora again, but this time with a jet black handgun barely slipping through his hands. Closer and closer and closer he got, till he shot her point blank in the head—

Marinara sauce littered the room. But not blood. Sid took a nice hot shower for way too long. When he came out wrapped in a fluffy white towel, he ripped out shreds of a motherboard from the back of Nora’s head, ripped to shreds from the bullet. 

She was too certain of her humanity to be human. An ironic paradox. When he thought of this, Sid laughed and exploded into tears. What odd emotions he felt; how contradictory. How human. 

We aren’t logical beings, are we?

Smiling, frowning, crying, laughing, Sid shook his head no.


	4. Chapter 4

Sid watched the sun rise, looking at the splatters of yellow glare it splashed on the trees and the birds peeping through them.

In a nature reserve, both in and outside of society, Sid stayed; hunting to survive, both constrained and freed by nature. His lower half covered by the same towel he entered in, Sid was both exposed and not, both trapped by his past and overcoming it. 

It had been ― how many days? he had lost count ― let’s say six months since he had left society; a society of robots, a society of numbers and logic and maybe even facts…

And he enjoyed every day.

What a wonder it was that he hadn’t disrupted the natural habitat too much.

He watched the sun set, a death and a rebirth, and dozed off.

Sid, much younger now, sat on a metal chair at a wooden desk on a tile floor in a cramped room ― without his glasses.

Stress dream. No, no, no, not another stress dream.

Neuron Structure Quiz 9th Grade Biology

action potential a)Na+ K+

b) pump **on**

ion en r gy c)

 **off** **onnn** Ca2+ d i a gggr am

neuron stemmmmm **onoff**

neurotranssssssssssssmitter **on**

**off**

**on**

**off**

**on**

**off**

  
  


But he thought of the dream ― it showed him that there is no difference between us and robots; that we go on and off and on and off the same; that just as Sylvia didn’t know, just as Nora didn’t know, it didn’t matter. Metal, cells, to hell with it.

To hell with the reserve, finding excuses to run away; run away from the world, run away from his dead wife.

What did it mean to be human?

What does it mean to be human? 

What does it matter?

He ran on the grass, trampling over the snake holes.


End file.
